Comments on: Check for Widgets in Widget-Areas

By: Dameer

Dameer — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 07:22:12 +0000

Hi all! I was looking for a way to dynamically add sidebar widgets without involving WP's default "if ( !function_exists( 'dynamic_sidebar' ) || !dynamic_sidebar( 'Home Page' ) )" However, it's not easy to find out current sidebar index. WordPress does index them as "sidebar-1", "sidebar-2", "sidebar-3", etc. in spite of the fact they might be named with "Home Page", "Category Page", "Footer Column Left", etc. Otherwise spoken, you can't rely on "is_active_sidebar()" without knowing sidebar $index (it's a required argument!). So, prior to above code, I found the following to work fine as a current sidebar index detector:


$how_many_widgets_here = 0;
$which_widgets_here = array();
$widget_area_name = 'Home Page'; // seek for number of widgets in this widget-ready area
$required_sidebar_id = ''; // widget-ready area name/index assigned by WordPress
$keyz = array_keys( $wp_registered_sidebars ); // get keys of all
foreach( $keyz as $k => $v ) { // iterate all
	$single_arr = $wp_registered_sidebars[ $v ];
	foreach( $single_arr as $kk => $vv ) { // next level
		if( $vv == $widget_area_name ) {
			$required_sidebar_id = $single_arr[ 'id' ]; // get the match
		}
	}
}
if( $required_sidebar_id != '' ) { // if not blank
	$all_widgets = wp_get_sidebars_widgets();
	$which_widgets_here = $all_widgets[ $required_sidebar_id ];
	$how_many_widgets_here = count( $all_widgets[ $required_sidebar_id ] ); 
}

Yeap, the above code contains much more than required in this case, my intention is to leave it there coz someone could find it useful - who knows. What you will probably need here is actually "$required_sidebar_id" value. Now it's safe to continue with:


if( function_exists( 'is_active_sidebar' ) && is_active_sidebar( $required_sidebar_id ) ) {

		dynamic_sidebar( $required_sidebar_id );

}

Hopefully it helps.

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:48:00 +0000

@Justin: Thanks for the tipp!

By: Justin Tadlock

Justin Tadlock — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:18:05 +0000

I've always loved this snippet of code and have used it for quite some time. But, an equivalent of this function was added in WordPress 2.8: is_active_sidebar(). So, there's no need for a custom function any longer.

By: designfollow

designfollow — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:38:03 +0000

great, thank you.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:35:11 +0000

Hi,

thanks a lot for mentioning our code

This snippet was build to prevent a fully styled but empty widgetized area.

Last month I spoke to Kaspars Dambis the creator of the Widget Context plugin and asked him, if he could support this method with his plugin. The same day about 3 hours later I got a first working copy of his plugin.

The latest version of his plugin supports the above mentioned code snippets.

Chris